The present invention generally relates to automatic cooking machines for use in preparing dishes using recipe steps and cooking conditions coded as a computer program in association with human or material handling robots facilitating transfer of ingredients to cooking stations.
A need exists for a cooking appliance for use in automated home cooking as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 9,131,807. U.S. Pat. No. 782,224 by Oleynik, U.S. Pat. No. 7,174,830 by Dong and U.S. Pat. No. 8,276,505 by Buehler all disclose food preparation environments that are similar to traditional kitchens with large flat workspaces more than several yards in length shared by ingredients, cooking tools and cooking stations. Such large conventional kitchen automation systems when fully built occupy a large space and use large size industrial robots when fully automated for cooking ingredients transfer resulting with similar overall system sizes as a conventional kitchen and not suitable for use as a self-contained appliance of reasonable size or fit in small spaces such as a small kitchen in a high-rise apartment, condominium, recreational vehicle, a watercraft or an aircraft. They are also very expensive to build due to their large sizes even without the material handling robots and will require significant retrofitting and construction costs to incorporate into existing homes if needed.
Further all food preparations systems disclosed in prior art, have been invented to replace a human cook in a home environment preparing one or two dishes simultaneously or as larger batch processing systems for a business for efficiency with high food production rates or a small device with a single cooking station such as an automated crock-pot and none can fill the need of a fully functional automatic home cooking machine appliance with plurality of stations working independently comparable in form to a household cooking range, refrigerator or dishwasher.
A need exists for a highly compact, self-contained, reliable fully functional automated home cooking appliance that is useful for cooking to homeowners, apartment dwellers, recreational vehicle owners, on yachts and aircrafts.
A need therefore exists to provide an automatic cooking appliance that allows cooking of several varied dishes simultaneously and able to monitor laborious cooking processes such as stirring and heating control freeing up a human cook or robot from such time consuming tasks and eliminate task overload for a human or robot when multiple dishes or stations need simultaneous monitoring or physical assistance. Further, the footprint and cost of such automatic cooking appliance needs to be affordable and contained within a well-defined envelope same as other home appliances.